9.30 am Yey! This a historical day – the first ever California Data Camp will happen here at Citizen Space downtown San Francisco. Also we’ll have an app contest to build web apps on the public data that has been released by the City of San Francisco. The event is organized by Spot.Us and California Watch, a journalism initiative of Center for Investigative Reporting.

So far, I’ve spotted people from DataSF, MAPlight.org, from Muni, O’Reilly media, Mother Jones, among the others, and citizens interested in data.

More about this event here: http://spot.us/pitches/272

10:00am: After introductions we are organizing ourselves in groups to discuss topics such as and talk about data, journalism, governance, openness. The hashtag for the event is #CAdata.

Folks involved in the DataSF App contest have gone upstairs to do code in peace. They will join us at the end of the day to present their work and the winners will get a $500 gift certificate to Apple and an iPod Touch. (Thanks to the sponsors!)

Susan Mernit organizing topics for the Bar Camp with her partner Andrew Hoerner.

More photos:

11.00am At the first workshop round, attending Citizen 2.0 workshop (two other sessions are going on at the same time)

We are talking about what kind of data people care about, also what data tells the story you want to tell? How to reach out to the community? Good tools? How to crowdsource data? Excerpts of the discussion:

- A tool for reaching people: SeeClickFix – you can report issues that matter to you. But how to make people to solve the problems reported on SeeClickFix? What would be the incentive/carrot?

- How about Wikipedia for crowdsourcing data – not only collecting data, but making the community judge what is relevant?

- How to get a critical mass in smaller towns to submit data?

Adriel Hampton giving an example of a successful campaign. A town was going to build an ugly parking garage, and Hampton was opposing it. He started a blog covering the garage project, got mainstream news coverage, partnered with a lady who would have lost her house because of the garage. At the end, the garage plan was changed.

Adriel Hampton on the right in the picture below, Rose Garrett on the left.

How do you get the message to City Hall, is it crucial to get coverage in the mainstream media, engage people?

- http://www.socialcompact.org/ – a service about economic data for unserved communities, tells about economic indicators etc.

Also mentioned in the discussion for collaborative technology PbWiki, MixedInk, NationBuilder, Act.Ly, GovLuv, Spatialkeg, Everyblock.

Tool for getting people sharing data: GoogleFusion – great stuff on healthcare and climate change

The big thing is to get people engaged, really wanting to work on the issue.

How about MySpace using for crowdsourcing data?

You can also work with the tools you have, e.g. at Mission Local, people are sending videos all the time with low end cellphones. No tech savviness needed.

Danah Boyd is one of the leading researchers on digital divide regarding social media.

A problem: Lot of important data is published on PDFs, and it is expensive and time consuming to convert these files into useful data formats such as spreadsheets etc.

Traditional partners to campaign, to advocate with:

Chambers of Commerce, churches, Rotary, schools, local events – somebody got most of his blogreaders by handing out event fliers.

How about local libraries letting use their computers for campaigning?

An idea at the session: We need an ideologically agnostic platform, not pushing one ideological approach, important especially when connecting on a local, neighborhood level.

A book called GroundsWell, telling how to deal with 2.0 world, tools how to find your space.

Conclusion: People are getting more engaged. So there’s hope for more shared data

Noon. My second session – DataSF (two other session are going on at the same time)

Cool people participating in the session: engineers, software developers, lot of people interested in transit data.

Jay Nash of DataSF in the picture below.

Jay Nath of DataSF speaking about the background of DataSF.

DataSF started from Obama’s call for transparency. Having one location for the data, like a catalogue. Washington DC did that.

Reached out for datagov.org to do collaboration.

Decentralized approach, good way to get data out there, but not yet ideal.

We don’t know what people want, what they find interesting, that’s why we need feedback and people requesting what kind of datasets they want to have. People can also vote for their favorite data set suggestion. The datasets that will be built are not always the most voted ones, though.

Changing the mindset in the governance is the most challenging part. Sharing is scary for some people. Sometimes it is a long process to get data out: legal review, figuring out how get the data through firewalls, etc.

In the picture below, Bill Allison of Sunlight Foundation leading a session.

Street sweeeping schedule was the most requested information. The data is on available on DataSF.

It is becoming more and more common for not so techsavvy people to take data and create something of it, as mashup tools like YahooPipes are available.

We are at infancy for open data. Different ways to apply the open data policy.

Somebody asks: “What is the best way for journalists to get hold of public data?”

An anwer: As a journalist, you have to advocate for an open data policy in your city. Another answer: Go straight to the IT person, less politics, more access.

In some cities, you can be charged $2 000 for a MySQL query.

Jay Nath: It is a culture shift, it takes time. This is an evolution.

MomMaps, an app to find kid friendly location in San Francisco is good example of a good, useful app. You can find kid friendly museums, parks and restaurants on the app.

Will somebody build an app based on street sweeping dataset?

Jay wondering if DataSF could use OpenID for registration and get people to participate.

EcoFinder is an app helping you find recycling locations in SF.

How to license the data, a standard like “attribution only”, maybe using Creative Commons kind of a system?

Question from the group: Could we subscribe for changes in the data sets on DataSF?

Here’s a link to TechLiminal’s blogpost about parallel session about data primer.

Craig Newmark says to the attendees: You are part of something bigger , a trend of something new. We are changing the ways how we govern ourselves.

Craig Newmark’s blogpost on DataCamp.

David Cohn of Spot.Us and Craig Newmark of Craigslist in the picture below.

2.15pm At a session about crowdsourcing, journalism, data

The main question in the session is: How to use crowdsourcing for journalism, data in journalism?

Sarah Granger in the picture below.

How can we create a virtual community to comment on issues, asks a journalist from KQED’s California Report. The programs get usually only a handful of comments.

Attendees at the session giving examples of good community engagement. Huffington Post Social News a good example of an attempt to build social network around news. David Cohn of Spot.Us mentions a citizen newspaper called BrooWaHa where the community organizes itself around topics and friend each other.  Inappropriate commenters are kicked out by the community.

I’m wondering: “Think why would you want to have comments on your publication? What is the value of the comments? What is the value of leaving a comment?”

Do we see avid discussions and commentary only on partisan publications?

“No, we see commentary also on the Wall Street Journal about finance and such”, an attendee in the session responses.

Another attendee comments: “Don’t you think that the Wall Street Journal is partisan?”

MAPLight.Org gets rid of their commentary – it was junk most of the time, and it just didn’t make sense the  the organization says.

Good sites for journalists to get data, or examples to use data:

The California Secretary of State – campaign finance analysis

The LA Times Datadesk a good example of a traditional news publication using data and creating interaction with the readers.

The user experience is important, hire the right people to make visualizations.

Conclusion: We need a Wikidata or DataWiki, a hub for databases. Organizations could share and submit their datasets there.

4.30pm In a session about data visualization and storytelling.

Useful links for data visualization:

Development Seed

Stumble Safely - find a safe way home

Twistory - combine your Twitter history with your calendar

IBM’s ManyEyes

Deep linking to YouTube video to an exact timestamp, hashtagging it (an article on Mashable)

A cool visualization of the locations of high interest mortgages in the US

Trendalyzer, a software for animation of statistics developed by a Swede, then acquired by Google

Linkfluence , and there a cool map on politics

Dan Brekke pf KQED with his laptop in the picture below.

5.15pm DataSF App contest participants presenting (links to the app presentations later, this is only a brief look into the apps)

Water saving app. The app would suggest water saving tips for sanfranciscans, based on their water consumption. An awesome idea! The challenge: how to get hold of the data of individual’s water consumption? Not publicly available.

Urban tree saving app. An app to request a tree on your street, and to flag down a suffering tree that needs maintenance. Based on SF city’s dataset of trees. I would name the app as Happy Tree. More information, and directions to the code here.

Augmented reality app for mobile showing crimes in the direction you are pointing your mobile to.

Josh showing the augmented reality app in the picture below.

Susan Mernit of Oakland Local/California Watch and Jay Nath of DataSF exploring the augmented reality app.

After School Special. An app about gaps between high and low income neighborhoods. The visualization shows what kids do after school in different neighborhoods in the city, it shows where public and private schools are located, where MacDonald’s are, where farmers markets are, etc. Here’s the link to the app: http://www.afterschoolsf.org/

BlueZones in SF. The app shows where the nearest blue zone (parking for diasabled) is.

The judges go and cuddle on a couch, meaning they discuss about the apps. The process takes only 5 minutes.

Judges at work in the picture below.

5.50 pm Honorary mention goes to the augmented reality app. Tree app is the winner! Yey! The guys behind the tree app are Scot Hacker and Chuck Harris. Hacker says he is a treehugger but the idea of an app to flag down trees is actually his wife’s

Picture of the happy winners. Hacker on left, Harris on right.

Corey working on her laptop.

Happy data enthusiasts.

Scott Hacker presenting his winner/killer app.

Robert Rosenthal of CIR talking about immersion journalism on the phone.

Judge Amy Garner observing the app contest, David Cohn (right) of Spot.Us and Bruce Wolfe (left) of Marin Institute doing the same thing.

Related posts:

1. Bringing Data to the People – California Data Camp and DataSF Web App Contest
2. Data for Our Housing Story
3. Data on Bay Area Home Prices
4. Solar apprenticeship program heats up in California
5. Axe Finalist in 'Crowd-Sourced' Photojourno Contest